Martin Creed Unleashes His Demons in ‘Back Door’ at the Park Avenue Armory

The artist Martin Creed at the Park Avenue Armory where his retrospective exhibition has been installed.Credit
Hilary Swift for The New York Times

Martin Creed, the British artist, was standing in the Park Avenue Armory’s 55,000-square-foot drill hall one day last week when the curator Tom Eccles turned to him with a question. The two were watching a short film from Mr. Creed’s new “Mouth” series, which will be the centerpiece of a retrospective that opens on Wednesday. The film, projected far larger than life, shows a distinguished-looking woman — the artist’s mother — opening her mouth in slow motion to reveal something white on her tongue.

“What is that?” Mr. Eccles asked.

“Yogurt,” said Mr. Creed.

“Yogurt,” said Mr. Eccles.

Yogurt promises to be one of the more innocuous substances on view when Mr. Creed takes over the armory for two months. Elsewhere in the exhibition, viewers will encounter films of people vomiting and of people defecating, along with a piano that opens and slams shut, an array of metronomes ticking at different speeds, and a room whose lights go on and off at one-second intervals. All are outpourings from Mr. Creed’s psyche, a delicate but highly tuned instrument beset by odd compulsions and Freudian obsessions.

Even the yogurt has implications: At the far end of the darkened drill hall is the armory’s back door, a small, utilitarian portal set to open for a few seconds after every showing. The door, Mr. Eccles pointed out, is meant to suggest a body part that back doors have been known to represent before.

“It’s pretty remarkable the armory is letting us do this,” observed Mr. Eccles, who assembled the exhibition in partnership with Hans-Ulrich Obrist, artistic director of the Serpentine Galleries in London.

“The Back Door” is also the title of Mr. Creed’s exhibition, a sprawling affair that occupies the armory’s entire main floor, including not just the drill hall and the small, bunkerlike rooms that flank it but the grandly decorated, late-19th-century period rooms on the building’s Park Avenue side. This is Mr. Creed’s biggest exhibition in the United States, although he won the Turner Prize in 2001 and his work has been shown extensively in Britain, with numerous solo shows at Tate Britain and a career retrospective two years ago at the Hayward Gallery in the Southbank Center in London.

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The slamming piano, one of the works in Martin Creed’s exhibition, “The Back Door,” opening Wednesday.Credit
Hilary Swift for The New York Times

In addition to films, videos, paintings, installations and “interventions,” Mr. Creed will provide live talks and music on the first four evenings of the exhibition. There will also be a troupe of roving musicians performing for the run of the show. Their purpose is not to provide entertainment so much as a subtle sense of direction: If they go somewhere, Mr. Creed explained, “that means you can go there as well.” He is not, it appears, much of a believer in signage.

“They’re examples of people,” he continued, speaking in a pleasing Scottish lilt. “And hopefully, having examples of people in the show will help the people who come to the show — because they are people as well.”

Like many of Mr. Creed’s distinctive observations, this is hard to argue with. Still, the likelihood is not so much that people won’t know where to go, but that they won’t know what to think when they get there. What to make of an artist whose signature work is an empty room with lights that go on and off at regular intervals?

Annoyance is a not-uncommon reaction, though bemusement is a frequent response as well. Even the art world is conflicted. When Mr. Creed showed “Work No. 227: The Lights Going On and Off” at the Turner Prize exhibition, a well-known British painter responded by throwing eggs at the walls — and was banned from the Tate galleries for life. Critics have generally had more tempered responses. A writer in The Observer described Mr. Creed’s work as walking “a very fine line between the mindfully simple and the simple-minded.” The critic Roberta Smith called it “direct, irreverent and also clownish” in The New York Times.

“It can get a little fun-housey, I know that,” Mr. Eccles said. “But the armory” — built for the Gilded Age plutocrats who made up the National Guard’s so-called Silk Stocking Regiment — “already was a fun house in a way. A place for people to play dress-up and to act out.”

In the 1880s and ’90s, said Rebecca Robertson, the armory’s president, “they had chariot races, they gave each other trophies.”

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Balloons are part of the aesthetic in one section of Mr. Creed’s armory installation.Credit
Hilary Swift for The New York Times

The lights piece touched a nerve, Nicholas Serota, director of the Tate galleries and chairman of the Turner Prize jury, said in a telephone interview. “When it was described, it seemed to be almost without value, but the experience of being there was very, very compelling.” For that matter, so was the experience of hearing about it: Mr. Serota was in a taxi when the driver showed how the lights in his passenger compartment had been rigged to go on and off, and asked if he too would win the prize.

Though the public may debate whether Mr. Creed’s work qualifies as art, he makes no such claim. “I feel bad to say I’m an artist, because I don’t really know what art is,” he admitted, looking somewhat abashed. “I would say I’m a person who tries to do things and work in a field that is commonly known as art. I try and do things because I find life is difficult and I want to make it better. More bearable.”

Mr. Creed’s plight? “Having bad feelings,” he said, when pressed for a diagnosis. “Feeling bad. And maybe not necessarily knowing why. Feeling guilty as well. The problem with feelings is you can’t bloody wash them away.”

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Viewed as therapy, Mr. Creed’s art perhaps makes more sense. The same compulsions that have him fiddling with a succession of wet wipes as he speaks can be identified in “Work No. 2736,” which consists of a group of cactuses lined up according to height, or “Work No. 129: A Door Opening and Closing,” which it does, ad infinitum. This impulse is present as well in his numbering system, which he began when he was in art school — with “Work No. 3: Yellow Painting,” because he was afraid it would seem arrogant to start with Work No. 1.

“I call them symptoms,” Mr. Creed said of his obsessions, and of his works as well. He takes the comparison further: “A lot of organized religions are basically systems that have been built up to help people divide the world up into good and bad, dirty and clean. The chaotic mess of the world is difficult to deal with.”

Even for Mr. Creed, however, unpacking the welter of feelings that shape his work can be difficult. Take “The Lights Going On and Off”: For years, his explanation for the piece was that there was nothing he could put in a room that seemed worthy of worship. So he would just use what was already there, like the light switch.

“But in the last year or so,” he said, “I’ve been thinking that the real reason I made that work was because I used to love switching the lights on and off to annoy people” — in particular, his parents, when they were in the bathroom, where the light switch was just outside the door. Plunging his mother or father into darkness during a private moment was great fun. The guilt would come later.

A version of this article appears in print on June 8, 2016, on Page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: Unleashing Demons in the Armory. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe